My father, David Aspinall, who has died aged 86, was one of a small group of researchers who founded the field of computer science in the UK. As an engineering research student he was involved in building the Manchester University Atlas computer which, when it was switched on in 1962, was the fastest in the world. In 1970, David moved to University College Swansea to become professor of electrical engineering and create a new course, a BSc in computer technology, based on the model designed by his boss Tom Kilburn whose computer science department at Manchester University was the first of its kind in the UK. These people were the pioneers of the new academic and educational field of "computer science". David was born in Cleveleys, Lancashire, the son of Hilda (nee Whittle), who had worked in the weaving sheds of Blackburn before her marriage, and William Aspinall, a civil servant.

Tony Brooker, who has died aged 94, was a pioneer of computer programming and education. He designed and implemented the world's first high-level programming language, at Manchester University, and was later founding professor of computer science at Essex University. In 1947, when Brooker took up his first academic post, as assistant lecturer in engineering mathematics at Imperial College, University of London, computers were in the air. He joined Professor KD Tocher and another student, Sidney Michaelson, in building the Icce (Imperial College Computing Engine, pronounced "icky"). In 1949 Brooker became a research assistant at the Cambridge University mathematical laboratory and took charge of its differential analyser, a prewar analogue computer.

Seventy years ago was arguably the start of the modern computer age. A machine that took up an entire room at a laboratory in Manchester University ran its first programme at 11am on 21 June 1948. The prototype completed the task in 52 minutes, having run through 3.5 million calculations. The Manchester Baby, known formally as the Small-Scale Experimental Machine, was the world's first stored-program computer. It paved the way for the first commercially-available computers in a city known for centuries of science and innovation. Dr "Tommy" Gordon Thomas was 19 and in the final year of a physics degree at Manchester when he met Sir Freddie Williams, who designed The Baby with colleagues Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill.

Huge optical observatories and giant mushroom-like radio antennas now do the job. And to spot new events such as supernovas or pulsars, scientists use automated surveys to scan the sky day in and day out. But here comes the problem. While such surveys find plenty of'candidates', it then takes astronomers a lot of time to sift through the data and filter out events that don't look promising. Given the huge volume of data available today, it has become impossible to do manually - and that's where machine learning comes in, as an efficient method to analyse large data sets obtained by modern telescopes.

Turing went from drawing up a basic model for all computers to breaking down the constructs of complex chemical reactions with enviable ease. By 1943 the tide had turned – Alan Turing had developed the Naval Bombe, an adaptation of his decryption Bombe device capable of laying bare the secrets of the complex German Naval Enigma. Turing and his colleague Gordon Welchman built on the Polish machine at Bletchley Park. Turing and Church together hypothesised the idea of a universal Turing machine, a machine which could read and perform any algorithmic function – that is, a Turing machine that can simulate the algorithmic functions of any other Turing machine.